WSJ.com Launches RSS Reader for Subscribers

Staci Kramer reports on paidContent.org that the Wall Street Journal, like USA Today and the New York Times, has rolled out a personalized page for subscribers. Users can add any RSS feed to these pages.

If you've used Netvibes or the Google Personalized Home Page this will be old hat to you. It's similar but not as sophisticated as these others. You don't actually consume feeds here. You merely are able to view headlines that link off to their original sources.

However, the WSJ walled garden reader is important because of where it lives and who it reaches - highly coveted eyeballs. If they were to expand their RSS reader so that it cached feeds, rather than just link to them, it could create a potentially lucrative feed advertising platform. Under such a scenario Pheedo or FeedBurner could charge a premium for ads in feeds that are distributed on high profile sites like WSJ.com. They could split these dollars three ways between their publishers, the reader host (in this case the Journal) and themselves.

Tags: WSJ.com, pheedo, feedburner